Some of the portraits in the hallways and hearing rooms around the U.S. Capitol show former senators and House members in suits and ties. Some show lawmakers in shirtsleeves. One portrait shows a former committee chairman at his desk with his poodle in his lap.
Former Representative Carolyn Maloney, whose portrait was unveiled on Wednesday, is the only one wearing a firefighter’s jacket. Maloney, who represented a district that included the Upper East Side from 1993 until last year, did not expect the artist Sharon Sprung to paint her in the jacket. Maloney received it when she was pressing for compensation and health benefits for 9/11 victims and for emergency workers who responded to the attacks.
Maloney also did not expect her first encounter with Sprung to go the way it did, either.
“She came over,” Maloney said. “She goes through my closet and pulls out my fire jacket.” Maloney recalled the “offhand statement” she made in 2019 that she would not take the jacket off until Congress approved a measure extending funding for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund through 2090. That guaranteed benefits for those who became ill from the toxins at ground zero.
By then Maloney had worn the jacket to the Met Gala.
“The theme was camp,” Maloney said, and Lady Gaga was one of five hosts, with an entourage of men in tuxedos attending to the long fuchsia train of her dress. “Lady Gaga looked at me and said, ‘You outcamped me.’” Maloney recalled. “I said, ‘Nobody outcamps Lady Gaga.’”
The jacket ended up in the closet after Maloney lost a race for re-election in a redrawn district in 2022. Sprung — who painted Michelle Obama’s official White House portrait — was commissioned to paint Maloney’s portrait, which was bound for a caucus room where the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability holds its hearings. Maloney was the chairwoman during her last two terms.
The tradition of hanging portraits of former congressional leaders dates back more than 150 years, and in the mid-19th century the government paid for the paintings. Congress cut off taxpayer funding in 2016, but like many of her former colleagues, Maloney set up a committee through the United States Capitol Historical Society to raise money for the portrait project. In all, Maloney said, her committee raised $129,000.
Maloney said that her daughters had objected to using the firefighters’ coat for the painting, at least at first. “They thought I should be in a suit, looking like a congressional woman,” Maloney said, but Sprung insisted. “She said, ‘This is so distinctively you, it makes a stronger statement than you in a suit,’” Maloney recalled.
Sprung said she wanted to express her subjects’ “importance in our lives and grab people as they walk by the portrait, to get them more interested in who the person is.” And Maloney’s importance was personal: Sprung said that her husband, William Astwood, a marriage and family therapist, was in an office that was in the cloud of debris on Sept. 11. He receives compensation for a lung ailment that is pervasive among people who were in the area, she said.
Sprung photographs her subjects before beginning her work, and there are sittings (one or two, Maloney said), although Sprung said that Maloney “doesn’t sit still — still is not her way of being.”
There was also the matter of Maloney’s expression. “She refused to paint me smiling,” Maloney said. “She said, ‘You were not smiling when you passed this bill.’”
Sprung said she had sized up Maloney as “very proud and very strong.”
“I’m not sure she really agreed with my vision,” Sprung said, “but I felt so strong about 9/11, I just went ahead and did it.” She mentioned a couple of familiar paintings, among them “Whistler’s Mother” and Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” “You have a profound sense of who these people were,” she said. “That’s what I’m hoping for.” Maloney’s conclusion? “
She was right.”
